“Everybody Speaks English Nowadays”. Conference Interpreters’ Perception of the Impact of English as a Lingua Franca on a Changing Profession

Abstract:

The unprecedented spread of English as the first global lingua franca for international communication has been identified in the literature on conference interpreting as one of the most significant issues for interpreting today. English as a lingua franca (ELF) is a major force of change for the profession and is generally viewed highly critically by professional interpreters, because it pushes them into a subsidiary role in dealing with multilingual communication.

This paper looks at conference interpreters’ perception of the impact of ELF on their profession and the ensuing changes, on the basis of the introspective comments made on ELF in Gentile’s 2016 global survey on interpreters’ self-perception of their professional status. The comments take particular significance from the fact that they picked out ELF as a central theme without any explicit formulation in the questions prompting respondents to do so. This can be taken as a clear sign of the importance interpreters attach to developments related to ELF.

Aspects addressed in the answers to the open questions fall into three broad categories: (1) the adverse effect sof the spread of ELF on market conditions, (2) a decline in interpreter status and (3) an impoverishment of communication in international encounters. The paper provides a detailed account of the unsolicited qualitative comments on ELF by the respondents of Gentile’s survey and links them back to the results so far produced in the emerging subdiscipline of ITELF (interpreting, translation and English as a lingua franca) (Albl-Mikasa 2017).

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